Chris Killip: North

From the town of Huddersfield to fishing communities on the North Yorkshire coast and the miners’ strike, Chris Killip’s lens captures the divisions and communities that define England. Edited by Mark Holborn and produced with exclusive access to Killip’s archive, this is an essential publication not only for Killip’s fans, but for all those interested in the social power of photography.

Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, Killip spent much of his career documenting life in the North of England, shining a light on the economic and social difficulties that haunted these communities.

While operating in the documentary tradition, Killip’s work is marked by tenderness, by a refusal to cast his subjects as easily dismissible stereotypes. As Killip himself stated: “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered.”

It is precisely this approach that lends Killip’s work its timelessness, with his images reflecting the divisions that still exist in Great Britain. As Holborn notes, “We live in a world as fractured as that Killip witnessed forty or fifty years ago. Our consciousness is stalked by the fury of our divisions.” This publication is an evocative guide to Killip’s work across Northeastern England, alongside a selection of images from Ireland and the Isle of Man. With nearly half the images published here for the first time, Chris Killip: North is a moving tribute to some of his most essential work.